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West Bank Is Tense After Arson at Mosque

Palestinian residents of the West Bank town of Yasuf on Sunday lamented the burning and desecration of the town's central mosque two days earlier.Credit
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

YASUF, West Bank — Passions ran high on Sunday in this Palestinian village in the northern West Bank two days after arsonists, presumed by Palestinians and many Israelis to be Jewish extremists, set fire to the central mosque.

A delegation of Jewish religious leaders and activists, including some from West Bank settlements, tried to reach the village to express their abhorrence of the attack. But the Israeli Army prevented the group from entering Yasuf for security reasons as enraged villagers proclaimed that the visitors would not be welcome.

“The people will not allow it,” said Wasfi Hassan, a local farmer. “It is like killing a man, then going to his funeral.”

An acrid odor hung in the air outside the mosque on Sunday. Inside, a pile of cinders marked the spot where holy books had apparently been emptied off library shelves and burned; words were still legible on some loose, singed pages of the Koran.

The walls were charred, and a black groove snaked across the carpet of the prayer hall to a back wall, following the arsonists’ gasoline trail. Hussam Abd al-Fattah, the muezzin at a small nearby mosque, said that worshipers spotted the fire on Friday as they returned from dawn prayers, and that neighbors rushed in to help extinguish the flames.

On the front stoop of the mosque, the vandals left graffiti in Hebrew that read, “Price tag — Greetings from Effi.”

Price tag is the name of a provocative policy developed by some radical settlers last year. It calls for settlers and their supporters to respond to any move by the Israeli authorities against the settlements or illegal outposts, usually by attacking Palestinian property. The villagers assume the attack was meant as revenge for the Israeli government’s recently declared temporary moratorium on new building in Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Effi, a Hebrew nickname for Efraim, is also an acronym for a far-rightist group.

Munir Abbushi, the Palestinian Authority governor of the Salfit region, which includes Yasuf, a village of about 2,000 people, said there were at least 23 settlements built in the region. He said the Israeli government “supports the settlers day and night.”

Mr. Abbushi rejected the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could turn into a religious struggle. “It is a national conflict. We want an independent state, without settlers,” he said.

Photo

Rabbi Menachem Froman of the settlement of Tekoa presented Munir Abbushi, the regional governor, with new Korans. Credit
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

But Palestinian schoolchildren brought to demonstrate in Yasuf on Sunday shouted, “Khaibar, Khaibar ya Yahud,” evoking a legendary battle between the Prophet Muhammad and the Jews of the Khaibar oasis, who were forced to surrender.

Over the weekend Israeli leaders harshly condemned the attack on the mosque. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there was “no place for violence of any sort, neither Jews against Palestinians nor Palestinians against Jews.” He said he had ordered the security services to try to “apprehend the perpetrators and bring them to justice as quickly as possible.”

President Shimon Peres called the arson a “grave act” that “stands against all the values of the State of Israel.”

The chief rabbi of Israel planned to visit Yasuf on Monday.

Mainstream settler leaders also condemned the desecration of the mosque. But the Samaria Regional Council, which represents the northern settlements, questioned the widespread assumption that it was perpetrated by Jews.

In Yasuf, villagers recounted years of problems with settlers in the area, blaming them for a range of ills, including what they said was the poisoning of a spring and the theft of sheep.

Since the Jewish delegation could not enter the village on Sunday, Mr. Abbushi, the district governor, went to the nearest army checkpoint to meet them. Led by Rabbi Menachem Froman of the settlement of Tekoa, a fervent advocate of Jewish-Arab coexistence, the group sang a traditional song of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, which is being celebrated now, about banishing the darkness.

The Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, on Sunday ordered the removal of a religious seminary in the Samarian settlement of Har Bracha from a government-approved program that combines army service and Torah study, because the rabbi of the seminary encouraged his students to refuse any orders to evacuate settlements.

Also on Sunday, the Israeli cabinet approved a plan to change Israel’s map of national priority areas to include several isolated West Bank settlements, along with large areas populated by Jews and Arabs in the country’s north and south. The plan has been sharply criticized by the Israeli left because of the inclusion of the settlements, which will now be entitled to additional government financing.

Many Israelis saw the adjusted map as an attempt by the government to appease the settlers, who are furious about the building halt.

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said in a statement that the new map “serves as a blueprint for future settlement expansion.”

He continued: “It reveals the extent to which Israel’s ‘settlement moratorium’ is a sham.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 14, 2009, on page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: West Bank Is Tense After Arson At Mosque. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe